Niccolò Machiavelli

About this figure

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) was born in Florence to a family of minor legal standing and spent most of his working life not as a philosopher but as a civil servant, which is part of what makes his later reputation as a theorist of power unusual. In 1498, two years after Florence expelled the Medici and reestablished a republic under the influence of the friar Girolamo Savonarola, Machiavelli was appointed to a post in the city's second chancery, and he went on to serve for fourteen years as a diplomat and administrator for the Florentine Republic, carrying out missions to the French court, to the Papacy, and notably to Cesare Borgia, whose ruthless consolidation of power in the Romagna left a visible mark on Machiavelli's later writing.

When the Medici returned to power in Florence in 1512, Machiavelli lost his office; the following year he was accused of involvement in a conspiracy against the family, imprisoned, and reportedly tortured before being released. Barred from public life, he retired to a small family property at Sant'Andrea in Percussina, near San Casciano, and it was there, in enforced idleness, that he wrote the works on which his fame now rests. The Prince, composed around 1513 and dedicated to a Medici prince in an unsuccessful bid to win back official favor, argues in short, unsentimental chapters that a ruler's conduct should be judged by whether it secures and holds the state, not by conventional standards of virtue - a position that made the book notorious almost as soon as it circulated, and gave rise to the adjective "Machiavellian." Alongside it, over roughly the same years, he worked on the Discourses on Livy, a much longer commentary on the early history of Rome that draws opposite-seeming lessons about the durability of free republics governed by law and civic participation; how the two works fit together, one prizing a single strong ruler and the other prizing republican liberty, has been debated by readers since the sixteenth century.

Machiavelli was never fully restored to office under Medici rule, though he did receive a late commission to write a history of his native city; the resulting Florentine Histories, covering the city's affairs from its origins to the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492, was presented to the Medici pope Clement VII in 1525. Machiavelli died in Florence in June 1527, within weeks of a popular uprising that briefly drove the Medici out again and restored the republic he had spent his career defending, too late for him to serve it a second time. His three major works, along with his official correspondence, remain central to how later centuries have thought about statecraft, and are frequently read against one another rather than in isolation.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.